


A Perfect Fit

by TheQueen



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alien Invasion, Alien Technology, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Keith (Voltron) is Bad at Feelings, Lance (Voltron) is a Mess, M/M, Platonic Soulmates, Romantic Soulmates, Soul Bond, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-07
Updated: 2018-06-28
Packaged: 2019-05-19 03:42:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14865956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheQueen/pseuds/TheQueen
Summary: “Are you considering taking the cure? Find your soulmate after all these years?”“Why would I do that?” Keith says, blunt as ever.On the other side of the screen, Lance gasps quietly.“W-well...” The reporter stammers clearly surprised. “Why wouldn’t you want your soulmate?”A Commission





	1. Chapter 1

Lance is half way through his last (and first) glass of champagne when it happens. 

They’re at a gala for an Allura-approved charity dedicated to helping wounded veterans find jobs. Keith had been invited by proxy of Shiro and so had dragged Lance along for, as Keith had put it, “mutual suffering.”  

As Keith makes nice with the donors and Allura and Shiro dances across the floor, Lance has made himself comfortable at the bar with what ended up being prime viewing to the meeting of two soulmates. He’ll learn their names later -- Maria and Jacob, both born into separate yet great dynasties of old money and privilege whose families could not be happier for the lucky, wealthy match -- when their faces and soulmarks are plastered over every other magazine cover. 

For now they are both just two very pretty people bumping into each other, a spilled glass of whiskey forgotten between them as the woman grabs the man by the shoulders. In the movies there is always a moment of silent recognition, a second where the magic sets in and the soulmates realize who they’ve just met, how lucky they are. 

Lance remembers that moment. He’d been ten -- and so young, so naive -- when he’d run into Jasper on his way out of Macy’s, racing after his sister and her best friend. He’d tripped on something, probably just his own two feet, and then there he’d been helping Lance off the ground, wrapping one strong hand around his wrist. 

Lance swears the world had stopped. That as his soulmark burned into place, a bright blue splotch against his left shoulder blade — an exact echo of the mark on Jasper’s right — the world had gone silent and still in honor of their meeting. 

But as an observer it never looks like that. The world doesn’t stop. The world, ultimately, doesn’t care. It happens in an instant. A stumble. The sound of glass hitting tile and the splash of spilt whiskey. The woman bursts into tears and throws herself without care into the man’s arms. Slowly the room catches on. The cheers washing over the pleasant music of the party.

Somewhere across the room is Keith. 

Lance slips out onto the patio.

.

Jasper dies when Lance is fourteen. 

It is a drunk driving accident. The driver dies. The driver’s daughter dies. Jasper’s mom dies. Jasper dies.

For a long time, Lance dies too. 

Here’s the danger of soulmates. You live your whole life waiting for this person. Sure, you do other things. You have to. The human attention span is only so long and there are only so many ways one can stare longingly into the sunset. You pick up hobbies. You go to school and achieve goals. Sometimes you even fall in fleeting, temporary love.

But throughout it all you wait, you wonder, and you think “when I meet them, will they be proud?”

Everyone told Lance how lucky he was. He’d only had to wait ten years after all. They’d be able to grow up together. They’d never have to wonder “what will my soulmate be like?” because here they were. Young love, his aunt had sighed lost in the romance of it all. How lucky.

Three days after the crash Lance wakes up surrounded by sterile white walls, his shoulder on fire.

No one told him how lucky he was ever again. 

.

Keith finds him by the marigolds.

The view is breathtaking from up here. The Chrysler building is one of the last skyscrapers standing despite it all. Around them the city splays out like constellations against an inky black sky with the moon as its watcher, a forever beaming beacon. 

“Full moon soon,” Lance says redundantly as if Keith doesn’t know, as if he could forget. 

“Are you okay?” Because Keith had never taken his bullshit. Not during the war and definitely not after. 

Lance tries for a smile. When he falls short, he shrugs instead. “Just surprised me.”

For a few blissful minutes they stand in silence, watching their city spin below as a cool breeze wraps around them. At some point, Keith takes his hand and Lance let’s him. 

“You want to go?” Keith offers as the commotion inside settles. The new soulpair must have made their escape.

“Yeah,” Lance says and lets Keith wrap an arm around his waist, lets him lead Lance past well-meaning dignitaries and deep-pocketed philanthropists desperate to speak to one of the Defenders. Even lets him open the door to the car like a proper gentleman.

It’s an improvement.

.

The war starts with a hole in the sky. It starts with fear. It starts with first contact. 

The pod lands fifty meters off the coast, out in the lower bay. 

Lance watches the shakey phone footage from the safety of his childhood home in Durham, North Carolina, next to his Abuela, still numb from the crash that ruined his life three years earlier.

Lance watches as the aliens, large and purple and so human looking demand their surrender and assimilation into their great Galra empire. Lance watches as the human race, truly united for the first time since conception, tells the aliens to fuck off.

They lose the first year of the war and they lose badly. 

The aliens are stronger, faster, and more durable. In the face of this great invasion, their human soldiers just can’t last long enough. 

Luckily not all their soldiers are human. 

Lycanthropy was once considered a great disease. These days more and more people have come to view it as a necessary sacrifice. 

The soldiers bitten before the war were durable enough, fast enough, and more than strong enough. Not only in body but in mind and soul. Capable of lasting longer without food, water, and sleep while sustained on their pack bonds alone, werewolves could withstand the force that had crippled their brothers in arms and keep marching. The werewolf platoons alone had kept the invasion back, but just barely.

The price--the cost of lycanthropy--is simple. To be bitten is to lose your soul mark. 

When the world was made, it is said God or nature or magic or evolution split the human soul and placed them into two bodies. When these two bodies united, the soul was complete. The person made whole again.

A werewolf needed no soulmate. They had their wolf. In all ways that matter, the wolf became their soulmate, completed their souls, and strengthened their bodies.

To a young man like Lance, just barely 18 and with nothing to lose and so very tired of watching his world die, the price is something he’s more than happy to pay. 

.

The next morning Lance thanks Keith with a full breakfast for when he comes back from his run. Pancakes and bacon and cups of fruit. 

“Feeling better?” Keith asks, taking a seat at the breakfast nook and accepting the coffee Lance hands him.

After the war, they’d returned to New York with their sizable paychecks and bought the war torn landscape at a steal. Over the last six years they had encouraged rebuilding with a fever that his mother had commented as obsessive. 

Keith had grown up in this city and Lance had always longed for the old New York, for the glitz and glam. He’d dreamed of broadway and the fast paced life lived here. To help return their city to its former glory isn’t just about smart real estate; it’s about healing.

After all, humans were truly the universe’s most stubborn cockroaches. 

It wasn’t long before people started coming home.

“Much better,” Lance smiles, leaning across the table to tuck a stray hair behind Keith’s ear. “You have a good run?”

“Shruthi says hi,” Keith pops a grape into his mouth and says around the mouthful. “She wants to invite us for dinner next week.”

Lance turns to his own breakfast. “I imagine she’ll want to show us another million baby photos.”

Shruthi had been one of their first to move into their small renovated tenant building. As a fellow werewolf and veteran who’d lost her soulmate in the war, she’d refused to settle anywhere else. “This is where it started,” she’d told Lance in confidence while Keith and Shiro had carried her dresser upstairs. They’d been in the kitchen unpacking her china. “And this is where I’ll finish. We can’t let them take this city. It’s what Jessia would have wanted.”

Looking outside the window to the site of yellow cranes, Lance thinks that's what they’re all trying to do: finish the war.

.

The first wave of werewolves brings a new kind of soldier. 

The first are men and women like Lance, people who’d lost their soulmates because of life or because of the war. Mostly the war. The chance to meet the wolf as selfish as it is necessary. 

(There was a part of Lance that hoped maybe this could cure him, could fill the echo Jasper had left.)

The second are mated pairs, soulmates who’d enlisted together after finding each other. Their soulmarks nearly obsolete now that they knew each other’s face.

It’s all very clinical. The recruiter calls him by name to the next room where a doctor does a full work up and checks his family history before he’s lead to a third and final room where a soldier in full fatigues stands in parade rest.

“Are you aware of the cost?” the nurse next to the soldier asks as she presses cold nodes to his arm. 

“Yes,” Lance says, unable to tear his eyes from the man who would bite him. The werewolf. “Does it hurt?”

The soldier seems startled to be addressed directly before composing himself. He doesn’t even try to smile. “Yes. It will be the most painful thing you will ever experience.”

Lance nods, stealing his resolve. “What… what are packs like?”

The man is silent and for a moment Lance considers repeating himself before he says, “It’s like choosing your soulmates.”

It’s something Lance won’t fully understand until years later.

.

Pidge is the one who tells him. 

It hits news stations two weeks later, but before that Pidge calls him halfway through lunch with urgent news. “They say it’s a cure,” she warns him. There is a crashing sound behind her and she curses. 

“Do you think it works?” Lance asks.

“It does something,” Pidge snaps. “I personally don’t trust them. You know how people are. They think we’re freaks.”

Lance doesn’t say anything. Pidge sighs, “God damn it, Lance.”

“It’s good isn’t it?” Lance defends. “If it works…”

“If it works!” Pidge cries. “The only thing they’ve proven is it makes your soulmark colorful again. I wouldn’t consider it extensive testing.”

“Why tell me?” Lance bites back, hackles raising as another crash comes over the line. “What are you doing?”

“Research facility,” He could hear the eye roll in her voice. “Listen, just be careful, okay. You guys are pretty public out there. It’ll be the talk of the town soon and you deserve the warning.”

“But does it work?” Lance presses, hand coming to press weakly against his left shoulder blade. 

“I don’t know,” Pidge admits. “Just… be careful, Lance. Don’t say anything stupid.”

.

Lance meets Shiro and Allura first. 

They’re a mated couple who joined the war as soon as the call for volunteers had gone out. Shiro had already been in the army and had lost his arm in an explosion. The army had fit him with a custom prosthetic to handle a gun.

“It is different,” Allura admits, british accent thick. She’d moved to the US four months before the war to marry Shiro and be a journalist. They’d been living in New Jersey when the attack struck. “I can no longer feel him as I once did here,” she presses a graceful hand against her heart. “But I can still feel him.”

“Pack bonds,” Lance nods. He can feel it stirring as well in his gut. An instinct older than time calling to him, drawing him towards Shiro and Allura. They were his. They were each others but they were also his. It felt weak, fragile. Like one wrong move and they’d be nothing more than two passing ships on moonlit water. 

“It is different,” Allura repeats. “But I like it. Sometimes I worried, you know? Would we be together if we weren’t told? Would he have still chosen me when I live so far away? Would we have worked so hard to make it work if we weren’t told to? But now we don’t need each other. I have Her and he has Him and our wolves do not tell us to be together. Instead we choose each other.”

“It sounds wonderful,” Lance admits, thoughts turning to Jasper. What they could have been if only Jasper had lived long enough to be here. 

“How are you settling with Him?”

Lance shrugs. The wolf stirs in the back of his mind as if amused. It sends a gentle nudge like the press of warmth against his shoulder. The warmth spreads through his limbs. “I like it.”

Allura laughs, “Yes. I like it too!”

.

It’s hours before Evan’s grand opening when the news drops. 

Lance is busy scrubbing every scruff and scratch from the second hand counter they’d picked up from amazon and had Shruthi install, when Evan comes crashing in, calling for the remote, “Keith is on TV!”

“Keith is on TV?” Lance repeats, tossing Evan the remote. “What does that mean?”

“I mean he’s on the TV,” Evan cries, switching the channel to CNN. 

Lance hops over the bar and grabs a chair as Keith’s face comes on the screen. “What is he doing?”

“Shhhh!” Evan hisses slapping Lance in the arm. “He’s talking.”

“Are you considering the cure?” the CNN reporter asks, pushing the microphone closer to Keith.

Keith frowns (he’d never been the one for public speaking). “Cure?”

“You were famous in the Defenders for volunteering without finding your soulmate,” the CNN reporter explains. “Are you considering taking the cure? Find your soulmate after all these years?”

“Why would I do that?” Keith says, blunt as ever.

On the other side of the screen, Lance gasps quietly.

“W-well...” The reporter stammers clearly surprised. “Why wouldn’t you want your soulmate?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you Frostedeclair for your support! I had a lot of fun writing this prompt and think I managed to do something interesting with Werewolves + Soulmates. 
> 
> As always, please let me know what you think in the comments! I really appreciate everyone's feedback.


	2. Chapter 2

The second wave of werewolves bring a new set of volunteers, ones far more controversial.

These volunteers were not people who had found or lost their soulmates. These were volunteers who had never met their soulmates, who had signed up knowing they would never meet their soulmates and yet they had still signed up. The news called them great martyrs. 

Lance hated them.

Call it jealousy. Call it bitterness. Pidge does, sitting next to him on the grand staircase of their base -- a converted 20th century hotel long fallen from grandeur after the initial bombing -- as they watch the new recruits drive in. All young. All innocence and wide eyes. They had yet to experience the horrors of what they’d signed up for. They hadn’t even started basic. 

Lance sneers at the faded soulmark on the left arm of one of the new recruits. 

They had never known the loss of a soulmate. Now, he supposes, they never will. 

“Come on,” she says, slapping him on the shoulder as she stands. They have an appointment to make. They’ll be heading to the front soon. “Don’t want to keep Allura waiting.”

Lance yawns wide and stands slowly. He takes a moment to watch the new soldiers fall into line as their commanders bark for control. “They’re all idiots,” Lance says as he turns away. “Fools.”

Pidge is smart enough not to comment.

.

By the time Keith rolls around, Lance is drunk.

It’s been a solid two hours since the opening party for Evan’s new bar -- the first bar to open in New York since the first bombs dropped -- and the crowd is loud, alive, and vibrant. For the first time since the Galra fled and peace was declared, Lance feels like he can see the future being born in the warm yellow lights of The Freedom Fever. 

Yet, he can’t make himself smile. He can’t stop thinking…  _ who wouldn’t want a soulmate? Why wouldn’t you want your soulmate? _

He grabs another drink from the bar and slips his way through the crowd back to his table, nurses his beer, and feels the anger swirling in his stomach (or maybe that’s the alcohol). It’s the worst mood to be in at a party and then Keith has the nerve to show up, smiling and beautiful and the best damn person in Lance’s life even though Lance knows he doesn’t deserve him, can never deserve him. The universe gifted Keith to someone else before they were ever born and, not for the first time (with guilt swirling in the pit of his stomach along with the booze and the bubbling rage), Lance wishes Keith were his soulmate.

(He loved Jasper. He did. He always would.)

_ A love written in the stars,  _ Lance thinks, near hysterical as he finishes the beer and sets it with a thud on the new wooden tables he and Shruthi had helped sand down from found lumber in the rubble of Brooklyn.

“Lance!” Keith cries when he finally makes it through the crowd.

He’s wearing his red shirt. Lance loves that shirt. Maybe Keith will let him keep it when he leaves.

He’s silent for too long, Lance realizes when Keith’s smile falls. “Are you drunk?”

Lance shrugs. He wonders what he should get next. He doesn’t know why he grabbed that beer. He’s never been a fan of IPAs. “Probably.”

Keith starts to frown his disappointed frown, the slight pull at the corners of his lips coupled with the furrow of the brows. Such an expressive face once you know what to look for. “Lance?”

“Keith,” Lance sneers, pushing away from the table he was leaning on and feeling the world tilt.

Keith scowls as he catches him, bringing them closer than Lance can handle. Hand in hand and chest to chest like everything is okay. “What is wrong with you?”

“What is wrong with you!” Lance screams back, voice rising too high and the people around them start to inch away.  _ Good _ , Lance thinks savagely. Wouldn’t want a stray dog to bite. 

Keith just stares for a moment, eyes wide and mouth hanging slack-jawed. “What… Lance? I don’t understand.”

“Why did you lie?” Lance asks, finally pushing Keith away to lean back against the table. When Keith just keeps staring, Lance snaps, “On TV! With...” he gestures to the television in the corner. “The reporter! You know my mom watches that!”

“When… when did I lie?” Keith cries, reaching out to Lance and only stopping when Lance flinches away.

“I won’t keep you from them,” Lance gasps, wiping his tears with the back of his hand and when had he started crying? His thoughts feel jumbled around in his head, scattered and shattered and spilling out of his mouth when all he wants to do is stuff them back down and wait for the inevitable. “Your soulmate will… I won’t…” He bites his lip. “I won’t keep you from that happiness. If you want to go, go!”

Keith shakes his head, pulling his arms close across his chest in defense. “God damn it, Lance! How can you sit there and think I’m going to leave you!”

“You’re not my soulmate!” Lance shrieks high and sharp. He can’t bring himself to say his darkest secret. He can’t bring himself to beg the universe to change its mind. 

Keith flinches like he’s been struck. “Sometimes,” he says, voice wet as he bites back tears. The smile he’d come in with long gone. “Sometimes you’re the most selfish person I know, Lance. And not for the reasons you think.”

When he leaves, Lance orders another beer.

.

Keith gets transferred to their unit six months later.

It’s a dangerous move, one that Lance complains about loudly. Most of the team had met organically. Lance, Shiro, and Allura had been the first. First to sign up after the first year and the first to meet in basic. Pidge had come looking for her brother three months later, part of the first set of platonic soulmates he’d ever met. She fit in like she’d always been there, easy as breathing,

Hunk had been next. He’d never met his soulmate. Instead his soulmate had died young, somewhere far away. Hunk will probably never know what happened. Illness? A freak accident? It didn’t matter in the long run. One morning his soulmark had been red and vibrant. The next it was gone, a dark birthmark along his left thigh. 

“I thought I was dying,” Hunk admitted six days after he’d become pack. The rest of their team fast asleep as Hunk and Lance kept watch in enemy territory. “I didn’t understand until days later and the doctor had explained it to me.”

Lance had at least known his soulmate. For four glorious years he’d had the dream. He doesn’t know what’s worse: to have loved and lost or to have never loved at all?

But Keith had been assigned. Worse, he’d been part of the second wave of volunteers.

“He’d be wasted in any other unit with these scores,” Iverson says as justification.

Next to him, Shiro fidgets, shifting from foot to foot, as he reads through the file. Lance growls.

“Look,” Iverson says holding his hands up in mock-surrender. “Give it a trial run. A few tests. A mission. See if he fits. If he doesn’t I’ll transfer him and we’ll never speak of it.”

“An asset is an asset,” Pidge argues, pushing her glasses up. They’d had to call off the search for her brother to come back for this. It wasn’t that they had a lead. But it made sense she was impatient to get back out there. “I say give him a test. Never know.”

Shiro bites his lip, one of his few nervous tells. Lance can feel his wolf tense and his own echo the behavior. Neither were excited for the idea of a new wolf stepping into their territory. 

Hunk seemed neutral except for the slight frown on the edge of his lips. “We have a lead up north about Sendak. Do we have the time to do a trial run?”

Lance opened his mouth to agree when Allura speaks up. As pack leader it would be her decision. “Bring him,” she says, nodding. Lance keeps his mouth shut but he’s sure his displeasure is felt along the bond. “I have a good feeling about this.”

Lance’s first impression is less than stellar. Maybe he’s primed to hate Keith. Maybe Keith really was just that aggravating at first glance. Allura and Shiro had to pull them off each other like two mothers separating cubs. Lance had never been so humiliated.

It didn’t help that everyone else seemed to get on with him like a house on fire as they made their way to the front lines. Even Shiro, who had been just as territorial as Lance, seemed to warm up in no time, bonding over the love of hand to hand fighting and a similar past that Lance hadn’t even been aware Shiro had.

So when the final battle had come and their wolves were needed, Lance had bitten his tongue and worked alongside the stout red wolf for the sake of his pack despite the low growl he couldn’t help whenever Keith came too close. 

Then Sendak had taken Lance and Shiro. Bound them together with alien rope that kept them from shifting and leveled guns at their heads like the cowards they were.

Keith had saved them, racing in just in time as Allura shut down their ships security system and Pidge and reversed their engines to send them hurtling back down to earth. 

Lance doesn’t remember the fight well. He’d taken a solid hit to the head, spent half of it sprawled across the ground and the other fighting towards consciousness. When he woke properly, an unknown gun in his hand and Sendak at his feet, it was Keith who helped him to his feet. Keith who tended to his wounds. Keith who curled around him that night outside the wreckage of the warship as Lance kept watch.

.

Lance wakes up to the banging of pots against the countertop in the kitchen. For a moment, all he can do is lie there, staring up at the ceiling where shadows dance like a morbid puppet show before the need to vomit propels him towards the bathroom.   
  
Once his body has caught up to the fact that he has nothing left to throw up, Lance hobbles his way towards the kitchen where the smash of pots and the smell of coffee are strongest. Pidge is manning the stove. It’s the first thing he notices, squinting against the harsh sun. He hears the sizzle of oil and smells the fatty cut of bacon in the pan and can feel his wolf and his stomach protesting at the prospect.

Coffee. All he needs is coffee.

Hunk hands him a mug without comment and he sighs, breathing in the earthy aroma of proper Italian beans (Hunk could drink gasoline disguised as coffee if push came to shove but ultimately he has expensive tastes). 

“I see the idiot is finally awake,” Pidge sneers as she sets a plate of bacon and eggs in front of Hunk. 

Hunk doesn’t bother reprimanding her. Lance feels his heart sink. “I fucked up.”

“Yeah you fucking did,” Pidge snaps, crossing the kitchen in a blink of an eye, crowding his face. “He left crying, Lance! Crying. Keith! I don’t care what your fucking issues are, but it’s time you get over it. You’ve been a wolf for years now. And still--”

“Pidge!” Hunk steps in, pulling her away. “We talked about this.”

She scoffs, grabbing Hunk’s hand in hers. “Is our love less, Lance?”

Lance flushes and looks away.

“My soulmate is my brother,” she keeps going, gesturing with her free hand to the splatter of green freckles on her face. “Hunk’s is dead. Yours is dead! We still deserve love, don’t we?”

“We had our chance,” Lance fires back, glaring despite the sting in the corners of his eyes. “Keith… could- should have that chance too.”

Pidge’s scowl turns fierce and her face a splotchy red like she’s two seconds away from exploding when Hunk steps in. “Everyone says our life is predetermined.”

Lance nods slowly as Hunk gestures for all of them to take a seat at the table. His eggs must be getting cold. 

“So you’re thinking you’ve stolen Keith from his rightful path, right?” Hunk says, pushing Pidge into the chair when she doesn’t move. “But we can’t have it both ways. Either life is predetermined or this whole soulmate thing is bullshit and we have free will.”

“Hunk!” Lance raises an eyebrow. It’s always surprising when Hunk curses.

“Well I’m not wrong,” Hunk stresses. “I didn’t even get a chance to meet my soulmate, Lance. Why would the universe give me a soulmate who dies if he wasn’t supposed to die? Maybe I needed him to be my soulmate so I’d sign up for the war, so I’d help win the war, and so I’d meet Pidge. It all happened because he died!”

“But what has that got to do with--”

Hunk raises a hand for silence and Lance bites his lip. “Maybe Keith isn’t supposed to meet his soulmate. Just-- Think about it Lance. If all of us weren’t supposed to end up with that happily ever after then Keith was predestined to never meet his soulmate. He was always meant to join the war despite the mark on his arm. He… he was always meant to meet you.”

“Hunk…” Lance repeats, eyes wide as he lets himself fall into his chair. 

Pidge looks equally stunned.

“We can’t have it both ways,” Hunk sighs, taking over the stove. “Think about it.”

. 

After Lance stops trying to hate him, it is too easy to fall in love with Keith. Easy to fall in love with his bravery and his courage, his kindness and his beauty, his strength and his grace. 

At some point, it becomes hard to remember what the pack was like without him.

But despite their closeness, the way Keith always seeks him out during sleep and the way Lance always goes out of his way to walk beside Keith during marches, Lance doesn’t expect the kiss. They’ve set up camp near a lake, hidden safely under the cover of thick bushes and trees. The rest of the pack is asleep while Lance and Keith keep watch, quietly discussing their lives before the war. 

Lance is retelling a story of one of his family’s greatest holidays when Keith leans in and takes his hand in his. Slowly his voice tapers off until they are sitting in silence, bracketed by trees and silhouetted by moonlight. Lance still remembers the way Keith’s hair had fallen around his face, framing his liquid silver eyes. 

Keith makes the first move. Lance doesn’t stop him. And when Keith dares to move away, Lance follows.

But still Lance is uncertain about it all. He can’t help but wonder what his mother might think. She’d never forgiven him for signing up for the war. Now to dare falling in love with someone after his soulmate…

Keith seems to understand without him saying. While their friends joke that it was always meant to be, Keith knows how hard this must be for him.

“I want to be with you,” Lance whispers one day as they walk in formation. Voice just quiet enough to be lost to the roaring of the river to their left. “But Jasper…”

“I don’t want to replace your Jasper,” Keith promises, threading their fingers together. “I will never ask you to forget him.”

“Wait for me,” Lance remembers saying. “I...I want to love you.”

“I want to love you, too,” Keith smiles.

.

Lance dares to come home six hours later.

Keith is waiting for him, folded on the sofa with the TV playing as he taps away on his laptop. Probably working or finishing a few necessary emails. Their job rarely had proper hours.

Lance means to say hello. Instead he says, “I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Keith acts as if he hadn’t heard him and Lance would have bought it if he couldn’t see the line of tension in his love’s shoulders. So he holds his place by the entrance and takes a deep breath. “I let my fear… and my guilt get the better of me. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have treated you that way, drunk or not.”

Keith closes his laptop and sets it aside. When he looks up, Lance can see the red rimming around his eyes. He’d been crying. “I can’t live with you waiting for me to leave you,” Keith sighs. He presses a few fingers against his left eye as if to push the tears away.

Lance dares to take a few steps in, toeing off his shoes. “Hunk… Hunk got me thinking you know. He said that if we’re meant to be predestined for soulmates then that means everything must be predestined. We were always meant to end up like this. Me with a dead soulmate. And maybe… maybe you never meeting yours.”

“Do you believe that?” Keith asks. 

Lance takes a seat in the sofa chair diagonal from Keith and shrugs. “I don’t know… I don’t know if he’s right. I don’t know anything, but… I don’t want to live like that either, Keith. I don’t want to live thinking you’re going to leave me. I jus--just don’t know how to stop.”

Keith sniffles and reaches into his pocket. When he pulls it out he’s holding a ring. “I almost returned it today.”

Lance doesn’t bother trying to stop the tears. He can’t tear his eyes from the glint of gold in Keith’s palms.

“I got as far as the store entrance and then turned around and called Shiro.” Keith walks over and for one, terrifying moment Lance thinks he’s going to get down on one knee. Instead he pushes his way onto the sofa chair so they’re practically sitting on top of each other. From here Lance can see the diamond set in the middle of the ring. “I can’t return this. I can’t give up on that dream, Lance. I want to live my life with you and I need you to trust I won’t regret that.”

Lance rubs his sleeve against his cheeks. “Keith… I--”

“Shiro suggested a therapist. Matt knows someone who specializes in veterans and in… werewolves,” Keith says, rolling the ring in his hand as he stares at Lance, searching for something. He smiles when he finds it. “I want to try. I don’t want to give up on us. I-I want to love you, Lance.”

Lance dares to smile. “I want to love you, too.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \o/ And we're finished. Hope you all enjoyed the story. Thank you everyone who commented, kudo'd, and bookmarked! Your support is always appreciated.
> 
> As always, please let me know what you think in the comments below. 
> 
> And consider checking out my writing tumblr [ TheQueen117 ](https://thequeen117.tumblr.com/)


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